Have you read yesterday’s posting about the Australian FF who lost his captain’s rank because he cussed on the radio?  If you haven’t yet, you can scroll down to it or CLICK HERE to read up on it.  John Willis has served the Country Fire Authority (CFA) for forty years and held the captain’s rank.  The CFA is one of the world’s largest fire departments in terms of the area protected, primarily the rural areas of Victoria, Australia, and dates back to 1890.

During the terrible wildfires going on a couple of weeks ago, John blurted out one of Carlin’s seven words on the radio.  At the time, he had been working under the stress of the inferno for days and was also working a fire on his own farm when it happened.  (He lost half his property.)  Somebody up the chain of command decided that Willis was “over the top” by doing that and they have stripped him of his rank and demoted him back to firefighter.

As some sort of justification for it, the superiors said that “there had been three complaints in the space of four days about “bullying language” by Mr Willis.”   They backed it up stating:  ” Mr Willis had been counselled during the previous two years over his behaviour.”

Now I’m sure that most of you have known or even worked with somebody like John Willis.  By nature, they are blustery and demanding, and tend to roll along like a bull when they get into action.  That’s just the way they are.  And most of the time, inside they are among the most genuinely caring people you could find.  That’s why they spend their lives in the fire department.  You get past that noisy exterior and you’ll usually find a very good person in there.

So what’s the deal with this heavy penalty?  I won’t argue that some sort of discipline was merited for the radio slip-up, but a complete demotion?  And under the tremendous demands of the huge wildfires they were facing, what kind of wuss complains about his blustering?  All this whining about his personality suddenly coming up after 40 years?  It appears that the Peter Principle has a firm grip on the CFA’s hierarchy and the upper staff ranks are now being filled with incompetent simps who relish their authority and flaunt it to cover their own failures. 

And that includes those simps in the field who complained about his personality.  Normal people who have a problem with him would just go up to John and tell him to his face that they’re upset with his methods.  And then John would give them a withering stare for about 10 seconds before telling them to ” —k off!”

His reinstatement hearing is today.  While we’re waiting for the results, let’s get this equipment checked out.  I need to make some coffee.

Maybe I’m back on track now.  I went to sleep early last night and woke up late this morning, still in a bit of fog.  I’m going to blame it on the time adjustment, whether that’s  true or not.  Whatever it is, I am slow off the mark today and I have a long list of things to cover for the next couple of days.  Not to mention my errands and chores.  And now it’s too late to go back to bed and ignore it all.  So I’d better get started.

You may have noticed that one of our entries on the Blogroll (over on the right sidebar) where we list our recommended fire and rescue blogs, is FWnetz.  If you click on it, you will get a website written in the German language and then you’ll probably wonder why we have it on our Blogroll.

FWnetz is a popular website for the German firefighters that is a combination of blogs, news reports and magazine-style articles that is published by Irakli West, a Munich area firefighter.  Ever since I started this blog nearly two years ago, Irakli and I have been keeping in touch with each other due to our mutual interests.  As a consequence, Firegeezer has a lot of readers in Germany.  Not only is Germany the largest country in Europe (I think), but they have a very strong and extensive volunteer fire organization along with their paid departments in the cities.

Many European countries still maintain a “mandatory service” requirement for young men when they reach 18 yrs., but in Germany they can choose between Army service or fire department service.  As a result, they have a nation packed with people who have been trained early in firefighting skills and many of them carry that on through life by serving as active volunteers.  Couple that with the fact that the English language is understood by a high percentage of the citizens and you get a natural cultural connection between our two countries.

And they have a lot of interesting equipment over there, too.

Irakli is completely fluent in English and has generously offered to answer any questions and even take requests for informative articles to be posted in English about any facets of their fire service.  To kick things off, he has sent along a posting that he put up a couple of years ago about that gadget called the Hose Cart that we never see, but they use extensively.  I’ll be re-posting that later this morning.  If you’re curious about how they do things, or have any requests for articles, feel free to email Irakli West at:  iw@fwnetz.de .  He’d be delighted to hear from you.

Now we’d better get the equipment checked out.  I’ll go make some more coffee and get the hose cart article ready for posting.

There’s always somebody who’s late for lineup on the first day of  DST.  And I might be one of them.  I hate the first week of these time changes, I’m all discombooberated for 3-4 days.

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I just learned yesterday of another example of how sleazy politicians screw things up when they meddle.  This mis-named “Stimulus Package” bill that was just passed contains mucho money for highway projects.  But it can only be spent on road works in “depressed” areas.  Depressed areas don’t have traffic congestion.  So the places that really need new roads won’t get them, but there will be a nice, 6-lane divided highway leading up to the welfare offices.

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When you go to New York City on a sightseeing trip, make sure you’re plenty healthy before you take the guided tour through the United Nations building.  Because if you get sick in there, you’re not getting out.  I hope you read our posting HERE yesterday about their emergency medical protocols.  They’re a lot different than what is practiced in the civilised world.

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Twitter keeps popping up in the news these days.  Dave Statter’s workplace, WUSA-TV ran an AP story the other day about a newspaper reporter from the Wichita Eagle who, with the judge’s permission, reported on a trial directly from the courtroom by sending Tweets from his cellphone.  The story is HERE.

Think about that a moment.  We have a newspaper reporter who is reporting while bypassing the newspaper altogether.  It’s almost like live coverage of the trial.  I’m sure that it was just an experiment by the Eagle to see how it worked out.  But they’ll be trying to figure out how to embed advertising in the Tweets and if they do, wow.  The article says that this particular reporter has been using Twitter for a year in this way.  The innovative imagination of people is marvelous, isn’t it?

Well, let’s get innovative and check out this equipment now.  I’ll start the coffee and see how the Sunday breakfast is coming along.

I’m off to a slow start this morning.  One of those days where I’d rather be doing nothing instead of something.  And I’ll be coaxed along by Mother Nature because the temperature will be nudging 80º today.  How can you possibly expect to get anything done under those conditions?

Last chance is here for you to pick up some more dreck from Circuit City.  They have announced that tomorrow, Sunday the 8th, will be the absolutely, positively, final day of sales at the bankrupt chain.  I can’t imagine what could be left in there that would be worth buying.  Maybe some “stuff” on the bargain table, but certainly not anything that works.  You won’t be finding me in there.  They didn’t have anything that I wanted last year at this time.

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A NASA Delta II rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral last night just before 11 pm carrying a specially-designed telescope, called Kepler,  on a deep space mission to look for any earth-like planets that have surface water on them. 

Reuters

Unlike the Hubble telescope that has a narrow field of vision that can focus in on a specific target, this new telescope has a very wide field of vision and it will be scanning along a star-rich corridor, looking for planets that may offer similar surface conditions to our own here on Earth.  The Los Angeles Times explains:

The spacecraft carries a 15-foot-long telescope with a 55-inch mirror that can scrutinize a wide star field for the telltale dimming of starlight that occurs when a planet crosses in front of it, known as a transit.

Kepler’s field of view is 33,000 times wider than Hubble’s, or about the size of a human hand held up to the sky. The Cygnus-Lyra region near the plane of the Milky Way encompasses about 4.5 million stars. But most of those are too big or hot to allow a habitable zone close enough to the star for Kepler to see a transit.  The scientists expect to find hundreds of planets during the mission, scheduled to last more than three years. But even with the telescope’s wide field of vision, it will be no easy task for Kepler to find smaller, Earth-like planets.

Kepler’s telescope is outfitted with a sophisticated camera that will stare unblinkingly at the star field. The whole area will be imaged every six seconds, then stored in 30-minute chunks. Once a month, Kepler will do a pirouette in space to download its stored data.

All this money and effort just to find a new tax haven for the rich.

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I will join the chorus of millions reminding you to set your timepieces forward tonight because that stupid Daylight Savings scheme begins already in most of the United States and Canada.  The wise folks in Arizona, Hawai’i, Saskatchewan and Puerto Rico don’t do daylight savings.

Most of Europe switches three weeks later on March 29.  Australia, New Zealand and Mexico lose an hour’s sleep on April 5.

Before we lose our hour, let’s get this equipment checked out.  I need to make some more coffee, and soon.